I would love to help simplify my storage at home, and I'd be interested in something like the WD Live Book Duo devices which have a pair of drives in an enclosure with RAID out of the box. But if you look at the ratings for these types of solutions on Newegg, for example, they're pretty atrocious. Could be one of those cases where you actually do get what you pay for.

Is a man better off just getting a quality diskless enclosure and populating it with his down drives of choice?

I've used a couple Buffalo NAS devices and they've been pretty good. The current model I use can be configured either as RAID 0/1 or JBOD. DLNA is of course supported, and the newer models are also Active Directory compatible. I get write speeds of about 20~25 MB/s across a gigabit connection; read speeds are around 40 MB/s.

What makes the Drobo crap, out of curiousity. The tech looks pretty neat.

I guess bitter party of 1 (me), because of the high pricing?

Then you build your own. I put my 16TB array together for under $2500, including an enterprise class RAID controller and 2U rack mount case. But, you don't get the point an click interface and you have to know what you are doing and understand how to build and maintain the system. That's what you are paying for.

I've not used IXsystems gear before but I have used FreeNAS in a production environment for supplemental storage. You could also just build your own with FreeNAS base. I personally use a ReadyNAS NV+ at home and my only complaint is it is sssslllloooowww (~25 MB/sec transfer via gigabit).